Intelligent Conversational Agent for Enhancement of Online Communication in Universities: An Overview of Kenyatta University

University websites and online portals are the primary means through which potential students and other stakeholders find important information about an institution. University websites are essential to these organizations' marketing and communication efforts. In this paper, focus has been put on the need to complement these websites with the use of an AI Chatbot (UniBot) in order to serve more efficiently. This study aims at performing an extensive literature survey on intelligent conversational agents and the feasibility of applying them in enhancing online communication in universities. The study utilizes an iterative – incremental methodology to aid in design and development of UniBot, using AIML (Artificial Intelligent Markup Language) Pattern matching algorithm on the Pandorabot (AIAAS) platform, to generate high quality training data, with which, the agents Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model is trained. The study also provides for training and testing the agent using data which is acquired from Online Communication, University Website department at Kenyatta University.